Previous research has demonstrated that natural language explanations provide valuable inductive biases that guide models, thereby improving the generalization ability and data efficiency. In this paper, we undertake a systematic examination of the effectiveness of these explanations. Remarkably, we find that corrupted explanations with diminished inductive biases can achieve competitive or superior performance compared to the original explanations. Our findings furnish novel insights into the characteristics of natural language explanations in the following ways: (1) the impact of explanations varies across different training styles and datasets, with previously believed improvements primarily observed in frozen language models. (2) While previous research has attributed the effect of explanations solely to their inductive biases, our study shows that the effect persists even when the explanations are completely corrupted. We propose that the main effect is due to the provision of additional context space. (3) Utilizing the proposed automatic perturbed context, we were able to attain comparable results to annotated explanations, but with a significant increase in computational efficiency, 20-30 times faster.

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of textual commonsense knowledge bases, aimed at providing more nuanced and context-rich knowledge. The integration of external commonsense into language models has been shown to be a key enabler in advancing the state-of-the-art for a wide range of NLP tasks. However, incorporating textual commonsense descriptions is computationally expensive, as compared to encoding conventional symbolic knowledge. In this paper, we propose a method to improve its efficiency without modifying the model. Our idea is to group training samples with similar commonsense descriptions into a single batch, thus reusing the encoded description across multiple samples. We theoretically investigate this problem and demonstrate that its upper bound can be reduced to the classic graph k-cut problem. Consequently, we propose a spectral clustering-based algorithm to solve this problem. Extensive experiments illustrate that the proposed batch partitioning approach effectively reduces the computational cost while preserving performance. The efficiency improvement is more pronounced on larger datasets and on devices with more memory capacity, attesting to its practical utility for large-scale applications.

This paper details our participation in the Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE) workshop @ EMNLP 2022, where we take part in Subtask 1 of Shared Task 3 (CITATION). We approach the given task of event causality detection by proposing a self-training pipeline that follows a teacher-student classifier method. More specifically, we initially train a teacher model on the true, original task data, and use that teacher model to self-label data to be used in the training of a separate student model for the final task prediction. We test how restricting the number of positive or negative self-labeled examples in the self-training process affects classification performance. Our final results show that using self-training produces a comprehensive performance improvement across all models and self-labeled training sets tested within the task of event causality sequence classification. On top of that, we find that self-training performance did not diminish even when restricting either positive/negative examples used in training. Our code is be publicly available at https://github.com/Gzhang-umich/1CademyTeamOfCASE.

In this paper, we present our approach and empirical observations for Cause-Effect Signal Span Detection—Subtask 2 of Shared task 3 at CASE 2022. The shared task aims to extract the cause, effect, and signal spans from a given causal sentence. We model the task as a reading comprehension (RC) problem and apply a token-level RC-based span prediction paradigm to the task as the baseline. We explore different training objectives to fine-tune the model, as well as data augmentation (DA) tricks based on the language model (LM) for performance improvement. Additionally, we propose an efficient beam-search post-processing strategy to due with the drawbacks of span detection to obtain a further performance gain. Our approach achieves an average F₁ score of 54.15 and ranks 1ˆst in the CASE competition. Our code is available at https://github.com/Gzhang-umich/1CademyTeamOfCASE.

We study how to enhance text representation via textual commonsense. We point out that commonsense has the nature of domain discrepancy. Namely, commonsense has different data formats and is domain-independent from the downstream task. This nature brings challenges to introducing commonsense in general text understanding tasks. A typical method of introducing textual knowledge is continuing pre-training over the commonsense corpus. However, it will cause catastrophic forgetting to the downstream task due to the domain discrepancy. In addition, previous methods of directly using textual descriptions as extra input information cannot apply to large-scale commonsense. In this paper, we propose to use large-scale out-of-domain commonsense to enhance text representation. In order to effectively incorporate the commonsense, we proposed OK-Transformer (Out-of-domain Knowledge enhanced Transformer). OK-Transformer effectively integrates commonsense descriptions and enhances them to the target text representation. In addition, OK-Transformer can adapt to the Transformer-based language models (e.g. BERT, RoBERTa) for free, without pre-training on large-scale unsupervised corpora. We have verified the effectiveness of OK-Transformer in multiple applications such as commonsense reasoning, general text classification, and low-resource commonsense settings.